How did you come across the General Magic story as something that exemplified the themes that you wanted to explore in Inside the Box?

My first inkling of the existence of General Magic was on a flight.

I think I saw a trailer for the film on a flight and I was like so intrigued by the trailer.

Something like the most important company you've never heard of.

But it intimated that it was going to be this story of meteoric rise and some kind of fall.

At the time, I was having more exposure than I'd ever had to success literature, right? And it was striking me that we needed something more complicated.

Like, I just read this paper about Jim Collins' Good to Great, which I think is an important contribution, obviously.

You just have very simple rules that you apply blindly, and it spares you from the burden of thought about the complexity of issues, and that that's more prone to happen in an environment where you're overwhelmed by choice and overwhelmed by information.

How does this idea of putting constraints in place or structures in place help you live a better life?

Yeah.

And I don't think I had as dramatic a story as you did at the same time.

And this will sound like it's coming from an incredibly privileged place.

And I recognize that.

But, you know, a few years ago, I went to a writer's retreat, small group, like a dozen writers.

And we had to answer in one word what we were each optimizing for that year.

Like, you know, what problem you're solving, who you're writing for?

And now through the magic of YouTube, I'm in the office of David Epstein, the science writer, author of the two blockbuster books, The Sports Gene and Range, author of a new soon to be blockbuster book, Inside the Box, and he is here with some, I guess, some advice on what we can do about all this.

Yeah, Dan, I mean, you've been talking about why sometimes our best ideas come at the worst time, and you probably think of Saturday morning as really the worst time to have your best work ideas.

But when I was writing Range, I spent some time interviewing a scientist named Oliver Smithies.

When I was going through his diaries that were all digitized, I noticed that all of his breakthroughs seemed to come on Saturday mornings.

Hmm.

And I asked him about that and he said, "Oh yeah, some people ask me why I ever worked any other days.

I call it Saturday morning experiments," he said.

"It's a time when I'm not under as much pressure.

If it's not worth doing, why are you doing it? And if it is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

You just made me think of this new study that came out in Science, or really a meta-analysis, which is one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, that looked at careers of, I think it was about 26,000 athletes, musicians, and scientists.

And their main finding was that the things that led to peak youth performance were negatively associated with peak adult performance.

So if you wanted the best youth performance, you specialize early, basically, and really narrowly.

And if you wanted the best adult performance, you start broader.

So the Nobel laureates in the study, for example, progressed more slowly in their careers than peers because they were more interdisciplinary early on.

They got 10 years more slowly, all this.

Is anyone putting any thought into what is contributing to the most well-adjusted, happy, thriving individual? Not in this country.

Good

learning feels easy.

Like you feel like you're learning the best when you're actually doing the best learning.

And I think this is contradicted by the whole area of desirable difficulty in cognitive psychology, which show that actually techniques like forcing yourself to do a test before you actually know the material primes you to learn even though it feels terrible.

Right.

It slows you down.

It's more frustrating.

And so that's another reason why it's just like, Do meaningful things with people you care about in a way that is excellent and you're gonna be okay.

Yeah.

But it had some pretty big long-term impacts on my life that ended up being positive.

So it, so it changed both my, my school and my sports life.

So in school, which I was not super interested in at the time, and, and the bane of my scholastic existence was French class, where we had these tests every week where you had to listen to a recording of a native French speaker, and you had a worksheet that had a transcript that you were supposed to follow along with, but there were blanks in the transcript, and you had to catch the words as they were flying by and, and write the blank down.

And I was mediocre at this, and once I had my writing arm, my right hand, strapped to my body, it was no chance.

I realized I couldn't write fast enough with my left hand to keep up, so I started trying to memorize the words as they flew by, and I did that by attaching the words to things related to sports.

Y- I, I didn't know the term mnemonic device at the time-

But is there something else in this, this idea of, uh, of pre-registration or, or hypothesizing early that people might use in their own lives?

I mean, that path of least resistance, that was a big, big light bulb for me.

The guy I'm thinking of who's a major figure in the book is named Tony Fidel.

And he worked in the early 90s at this company called General Magic that was incredibly visionary and was basically making the iPhone 20 years early, more or less.

And first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history, it went public with just an idea.

not a product because they had such a big vision.

And long story short, it ends up becoming a disaster.

They had so much talent and so many resources that they could do anything, and so they did.

And then you're talking about those who have kind of forced themselves to have these constraints again, which is a really powerful way to think about the next steps, almost no matter where you are.

Mm.

Now I've been reeling that back, right? Containing my workday, joined a nonprofit board in my community.

Like, inconveniencing myself to sync up my schedule with other people and to find ways to contain my workday so it isn't just, you know, expanding into every nook and cranny.

It's like, I think about when Mark Zuckerberg first advertised the metaverse-

Yeah

... pandemic was involved, but let's say two years, and then I come across this Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi quote, the psychologist who coined the term flow for the feeling of immersion in an activity.

And he's talking about marriage, but it could be applied to anything, where he says, "One of the great things about being committed, if you're committed by choice, is you can stop wondering how to live and start living." Like, you don't spend that energy wondering is there a next better thing.

[laughs]

...

in the world to please take my money.

And so they had this huge consortium of international companies.

And they were innovating like crazy.

I mean, earliest form of USB, precursors to emojis.

They made a virtual gathering space where agents could interact for commerce, and what did they call it in 1990? The cloud.

And so as I was reading about what UPS went through, I found myself thinking, "Man, I've lived through this before." What was one of the biggest surprises for you that the technology only became powerful when it started learning from the people? Or was there another insight that you gained?

Yeah

... from the way that people are actually living and thinking.

And so she took that time to sort of define what is the disconnect, and very carefully, and then she said, "All right.

Instead of doing a next book, I'm gonna do these short story experiments where each short story is going to experiment with a different kind of narration.

So I'm not gonna do this narration I used to do where, you know, uh, the narrator knows everything about every character and can just tell you what's going on." So, so she would ex- every short story she did in this phase was a different narrator.

Like, once it was from the perspective of a flower bed in a public garden and, and so you could just hear snippets of conversations as people walked past, and you just had to judge based on that.

Or one character trying to, to read another character without really knowing their thoughts and finding out that they're wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, whatever it is.

I mean, jet engines, like, you know, all sorts of, uh, rules that we use in math and things like that.

Um, it's...

And, and what usually precedes...

So, so, and the classic example is evolution by natural selection, where Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace.

When Darwin's-- Darwin had not published his findings yet, and Wallace sent him some of his manuscript, and Darwin wrote to his mentor and said, "I have never seen a greater coincidence than this.

Yeah.

So it's very counterintuitive to slow down.

You know, I was describing the work of a researcher named Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish guy who was an Oxford professor, who studied projects of all kinds, digital transformation, you know, solar farms, you name it.

And he ended up with a database of 16,000 projects over decades, and he found that very few of them come in on time and budget, and very few deliver the expected results and come in on time and budget.

And, and the difference between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't, he found, was a pattern.

The, the bad pattern was what he called think fast, act slow, where you just jump into producing stuff.

You maybe haven't defined your problem that well, maybe you haven't defined your customer that well, whether that's internal or external customer, and you move into execution.

And so you th- you go through the thinking phase fast, and then you'll act slow because you'll start learning these lessons painfully once you already have momentum, and everything will be slow.

Oh

So when you think of this in your research, if you were starting from scratch and designing childhood in, in the way that you think could be the-- give the best possibility for long-term benefit or to raise a healthy adult, what are some of the healthy constraints you would put in that actually would help kids flourish instead of limiting them?

Well, I mean, for sure I would limit some of the technology they use.

[chuckles] Um, and, you know, social media I think I would delay.

But I think I would try to delay technology in general.

I mean, I am doing that with my kid, basically.

Uh, uh, not, not that I want him to be a Luddite, you know? Like, I want him to learn how to use these tools.

But I think for the developing brain, there are a whole host of, like, b- uh, bad things [chuckles] that, that technology can do, where most of what happens in videos is, is really too fast for the way that the developing brain should consider it.

And I've referenced it before.

Oh, yeah.

Because we tend to only add things to our plate.

And then to do a subtraction audit, basically.

Say, you know, If I had to cut out one of these things in the next 90 days, what would it be? And then take that thing out or move it to the back burner.

And you're probably not gonna be able to get to all those things anyway, so moving something off might feel bad, but it actually forces you to clarify your priorities.

And because we only add and add and add, if you do this regularly, you probably end up with sort of more time and energy focused on the things that are most important to you.

And when I did this, I realized that I had things that were kind of medium priorities that were competing with some of the bigger priorities, and so really sort of stripped some things out of my life that would've been nice to do, but we are finite.

Mm-hmm.

It's not like necessarily we've made a mistake as a society, it's just that the problem has gotten harder because if you think you have to be on the cutting edge of two different fields to see the connection between the fields, that's just a lot harder test than it was, uh, fifty years ago or a hundred years ago.

Yeah, I agree.

And by the way, I think we absolutely need generalists and specialists.

In fact, when I looked at patent research for much of the twentieth century, actually, the individuals and teams that had the most impactful patents were diving usually more and more deeply into one area of technology.

And then there was a shift when information became more widely disseminated to teams that included people who'd worked in a large number of different technological classes and were often merging things from different domains, and a lot of these teams would have some specialists with depth and then these sort of connectors.

Some of the advantages that I talk about that's accrued to generalists is because there are a lot of specialists around producing useful information.

We've also made search easier so that it's become easier to be broader than a specialist.

I wonder why.

Are we kidding ourselves if we think we can process so much information at once?

You will have lower comprehension of certain things because your brain is, again, switching.

It's making these micro switches.

There's these research on software engineers who will find they even turn their music off when they're doing something, like, really cognitively engaged, or anyone's probably had the experience of driving and looking for an address and they turn the radio down.

That's not because the radio is getting in the way of your eyes.

It's because it takes up some of your mental capacity that you need to be searching for this address.

So if it's somewhat familiar material, not too complex, I think you can do that, but you will tend to catch somewhat less of everything.

So explain how taking breaks could help us improve our productivity.

... and collaborating widely and looking for patterns in other places, right? It was this This ability to bring these disparate threads together simultaneously that really kind of wins.

Absolutely.

I mean, to the...

Well, you mentioned Darwin, right? D- Darwin was a synthesizer.

I mean, he had 200-some pen pals that ranged from gardeners to other naturalists to conchologists, and he would pepper them with questions and sometimes surveys.

And what he was really doing was building up this body of research.

And I mean, he did do original work, but that didn't really have an impact on his theory of natural selection.

Yeah.

So if I'm trying to come up with a good constraint for myself, whether I'm working on a creative project or something new for work, how do I make sure it's actually good and helpful and it's not just some kind of shtick that I'm like, "Oh yeah, constraints are good, so let me put something there"?

Yeah.

So I think if we're talking about kind of the constraints that might push you to a new place, a new way to solve a problem, I sort of adapted something for my own work that I think m- and hopefully this will seem like a resonant example, that I took from Pixar, because I was doing a bunch of reporting on Pixar for the book, and they have all these rules that they use, and one of the rules they called the three pitches rule.

And this was directors had to pitch three story ideas at a time instead of one because they found that if people only pitched one, they'd get attached to their first idea, even though we know that your first idea usually isn't your best.

It's actually something called the creative cliff illusion.

Your best creative ideas usually come later.

And so I adapted that for my writing where with, you know, there's 12 chapters in Inside the Box, and I would start each one in some place that popped to my mind.

Yeah

And where are the employment opportunities in the AI world?

Uh, so this is great because I, I teach a little bit as well, and, uh, students are very worried about, well, where do I go? Uh, you know, what am I studying? What shouldn't I, uh, should I be studying? You know, there's a lot of depressed students that like, they come out of school, and there's not a job for them right away.

Um, I think, you know, there's always gonna be the cream of the crop.

I'm not gonna worry about the Stanfords and Harvards and MITs and Caltechs and Berkeley.

You know, I'm not gonna worry about, uh, students coming out of there.

Uh, they're gonna be well prepared, um, in being able to, uh, be the tops of their classes.

Um, and, and not to say that all schools have top students.

Pe- people would use these chatbots, OpenAI, et cetera, and feel for themselves that aha moment that, okay, this is amazing, right? Uh, can you explain to our audience in very simple terms, if possible, what quantum computing will enable and what that will mean for, you know, technologies like artificial intelligence and other technologies?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, hap-happens to me like crazy, and I think there are a few things to do about this.

Well, so you ma-- there, there are a few things.

Y-you made me think of a story that Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, uh, shared with me when I was spending time with him for this book where he said at Pixar they had a problem called the beautifully shaded penny problem, where the directors would get obsessed with, with these details in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny that the audience might never notice.

But they're very conscientious, right? And their conscientiousness would start working against them because they'd have animators working on it while other things still needed to be done.

And so they came up with a system where they had popsicle sticks Velcroed on a board, and each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week.

Uh, so how do you think about freedom? What's the fine line of just enough versus too much?

Do you have any plan, uh, to use any of this research that you did to influence public policy to help students or to help, uh, people make better decisions in government or anywhere else, similar to how like the research in Nudge was used for school lunches and 401Ks and things like that?

Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question because obviously I view my role as the writer and put the ideas out there and hope that people in, in positions will find it useful.

So I don't have like a systematic plan other than when ...

I mean, I live in Washington, D.C., and when people involved in policy and things like that invite me to talk, I certainly go, and I share opinions based on my research, not based on, you know, my own personal opinions.

Um, but there was ...

So there's a chapter that we haven't talked about because I think it's a little hard to talk about actually, to be honest, in a succinct way, where I talk about the work of an economist named Douglass North, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on what he called institutions.

And by institutions, he didn't mean like colleges and hospitals.

So I'm curious like how I should think about this in a way that they're not in conflict.

I'm like, well, what are we going to highlight and what are we not going to highlight? So that example you just touched on, the company that had total freedom and completely crashed and burned, do you want to give a snapshot of that company since we are in Seattle, which is often a tech company?

Sure, sure.

So this company was the first so-called concept IPO ever where Goldman Sachs took them public with just an idea, not a product.

What could go wrong? But they had this incredible vision where it was founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom had designed the original Mac, and one of whom whose job, this guy Mark Peratt became the CEO, his job inside of Apple was looking at the future of technology.

And he was amazing at that.

I read his PhD dissertation while I was doing research, 1976 at Stanford.

And on the first page, he coins the term information economy.

You can elaborate on any of those that you want to, but first I want to ask, were you surprised by the various different ways that people found to rein themselves in? Yeah.

in the

book.

And so, yes, I felt more willing this time to, you know, I like, let me go back a step.

So in range, I kind of packed it with science and studies because I, When I was initially telling people the idea I was working with, it would be kind of like, oh, huh, you know, raised eyebrow.

This time around, so I did scientific pile on.

This time when I would tell people the idea, they'd say like, oh, that's totally true.

And then when I would ask them why, they couldn't say why, but they intuitively felt it was true.

And now he has the size to go along with.

'Cause you, you address this in, in the book.

Let me give one thing that I think sort of in- that I just think is interesting or maybe symbolic of a larger point.

Just to educate myself over the last almost two years, I spent a bunch of time with one AI company that helps other companies implement AI.

And roughly what I'd saw, you know, very simplifying, I would drop some of those implementations into two different buckets.

One which was more normal where a company would say, "We need AI," and they would just try to implement it everywhere, and it would sprawl and lead to what some researchers have now called work slop, like this incredible volume of stuff that nobody's totally sure what to do with.

And I think that's some of the reason why we've seen this historically unprecedented adoption and not the commensurate productivity gains.

And then some of the other organizations would really take time to define what the problem is.

Hmm.

And so is that a good thing or a bad thing for you?

Yeah.

A few things.

I mean, so we were talking about desirable difficulties, things that make learning more difficult.

And so far, this, this kind of first, let's say, like, first run of research on AI looks terrible from that respect.

There was an MIT study that got a lot of headlines talking about brain rot, how using ChatGPT will rot your brain.

But there was actually more nuance in the study.

Right